Tuesday, October 9, 2012

Peach Crisp Plum Crisp

A while back, Marc Matsumoto from NoRecipes had a post on strawberry crisp over at his page on PBS's website. Sweet, a gluten-free dessert! And the butter is easily subbed out for Earth Balance or other non-dairy butter substitute.

At the time I was getting various summer fruits from my CSA (yes, I made this a while ago) and went ahead and tried making plum crisp first and then peach crisp. Well, you see, with the plum crisp I followed Matsumoto's recipe more closely, with the grinding of the oats. Buuut it didn't turn out so great.

I mean it tasted great, of course, but the topping definitely was more mushy and not crisp. I'm not sure why. Maybe pulsing the oats in the food processor caused it to absorb the fat/oil more since it was chopped up. Another problem was that I used way too big a dish for the crisp. I thought it might hold together somewhat and didn't have an appropriately sized dish, but ultimately it kinda spread out as it baked.

In any case, for the peach crisp, I cut the Earth Balance and other topping ingredients together with knives instead of pulsing in a food processor to keep the oats intact. This worked much better for me, resulting in a crisp oat topping (see photo at top).

In a ramekin, custard cup, or other small, oven-safe dish, toss diced peach with lemon juice, sugar, and potato starch. Set aside for an hour to draw out some of the juices from the fruit.

In a small bowl mix the oatmeal, maple syrup, and Earth Balance, sugar, and salt together using two knives and cutting the Earth Balance into the mixture until the ingredients are evenly distributed.

Spread the oat topping evenly over the peach, out to the edges of the dish.

Put the dish on a baking sheet to contain spills and place it in the oven. Bake for 20 minutes or until the topping is golden brown and crispy and the peach underneath is bubbling up through the cracks in the crisp.

Cored and halved mini plums, tossed with sugar, starch, and lemon juice. I know, not strictly a necessary pic for this post, but I thought they looked neat, and also whatevs.

Musing:

I've been thinking (woah now, best be careful) lately that I might have to change the name of this blog. You see, it started out as a blog for chronicling my, well, escapades in cooking(ery) as someone pretty inexperienced; my attempts were escapades in the sense of my making uncoached attempts to follow interesting recipes, and anticipating likely doing things loosely and incorrectly. I was kind of making forays into the unknown (to me) land of food preparation.

However, at this point, I've developed my skills and knowledge a fair amount. The feeling of being a blundering idiot in the wilderness is mostly gone (which is not to say I don't have a ton still to learn, as with everything). Lately, with my time constraints and with my CSA set produce (though it's soon to end for the year), I've done a lot of improvising, and been doing fairly well with it. Nothing really refined, but generally tasty.

Anyway, all this just to explain why I'm feeling like I might have to change the name and do a redesign sometime. Wonder how that'd work out. And there's the problem of all the old posts and linking. Maybe I'll start blogging my improvisations more, too, though again, they're not too refined.

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Thanks for stopping by! This blog is a journal of my explorations in dairy-, (mostly) gluten-, peanut-, tree nut-, coconut-, and various seeds-free cooking. Join me as I experiment with and improve dishes, nerd out about technique, and just try to put delicious food on the table out of an ordinary kitchen.

These days it's easier to keep up with what I'm currently doing at my Tumblr blog: http://chilliamwen.tumblr.com/, but longer posts may still appear here.